There have been decades' worth of new games and influential titles since the original Half-Life game of 1998, but that hasn't stopped the Valve title from being the subject of many discussions over the years. With the fan remake Black Mesa effectively improving on the original, it's a series that is held aloft as a paragon of FPS greatness, alongside of which are neat little details that reveal a little bit more about this beloved game.
Recently, an ex-employee of Valve has spoken about some of the rejected content that was supposed to be in the first Half-Life. Giving fans a sneak peek into some of the behind-the-scenes content, designer Brett Johnson shared some old prototypes of the influential title. One such thing was a mock-up image showing an early design from the locker room that players encounter at the start. Johnson recalls that the NPC scientists of Goldeneye 64, which he cites as a big influence on him, would run around corners when they felt threatened. He felt that said scientists in Half-Life needed a place to go when being chased, hence the locker room.
The image he shares shows the bloody brutality that was being tinkered with during the design phase. He goes on to say that, after showing the rest of the team the gory mess that would become the locker room, Valve eventually decided to pull the violence back a tad. It perhaps begs the question of how far, or popular, the series would have become had it leaned more towards excessive violence, and whether fans would still be talking about the lost Half-Life 3 to this day.
Johnson, who is now at ArenaNet and is working on Guild Wars 2, shared such memories on TikTok, and even discussed the idea that the game was not originally called Half-Life. According to him, a number of suggestions were thrown about the office, a couple of which were Trip Hammer, and The Belly of the Beast. While they might not sound like inherently bad names, there's an argument to be had that the games may have been viewed differently had the studio gone with one of the other potential titles.
He also spoke about the game's alien realm known as Xen, which the fan remake completely redesigned after much delay, which he said was created with limited time. While it's arguably not the game's strongest part, it's still a testament to the imagination of the creators at Valve in the late 90s, particularly as this was the studio's first outpouring.
Haf-Life 3 is still not in development at the time of writing.
Source: Rock Paper Shotgun, TikTok